What I don’t love is getting all the people that end up with me that got their start with other coaches… coaches that lack the most fundamental elements of teaching, attitudes , thinking, foundation, and actions steps.

I mean… after all they call it internet BUSINESS… so one could expect that some business know-how rubs off on these coaches… but it doesn’t seem that way to me. At least when I look at their results: clueless students.

The latest evidence for the current marketing training culture I had last night when one of my students kept on griping why I would not coddle and nurture his inane, stupid, clumsy, poorly thought out, unproven attempts at product creation. Why I don’t tell him “this is good and you could change this, or you could change that…” type of politically correct but mistaken and damaging way of teaching and leading someone to success.

When I learned (and later taught) architecture, the typical scenario was:

1. you had an idea. you put it on paper and you brought it in for your twice a week consultation.
2. the teacher looked at it, placed a semi-transparent sketching paper on top of it, and drew his “response” to your idea. Most of the time there seemed to be no connection: just that HIS idea was triggered by your idea.
3. you went home, you draw the idea, to scale, on paper an brought it back to your next consultation.
4. the teacher looked at it, placed a semi-transparent sketching paper on top of it, and drew his “response” to your idea. Most of the time there seemed to be no connection: just that HIS idea was triggered by your idea.
5. you went home, you draw the idea, to scale, on paper an brought it back to your next consultation.

You did this for the next 20-25 times. Then it was time to finalize the plan, so he stopped getting triggered.

You got a grade. You went through this process about 10 times during your 5-year training. On the other end you came out as an architect. You wondered if you were talented or you had good teachers. But you found out soon enough. Your grades reflected your talent and your willingness to take correction very accurately.

I had an A- from all my design subjects. I became an award winning architect. Some of my friends had B’s or even C’s and their later achievements showed a consistent level… go figure.

Had the teacher told me: this is really good, just try to change this or that, I would have stayed in my own little world of puny. Never would have gone the 20+ incarnation of the same project, 200-300 during my studies. I would have become an “I can design one type of building, if you want that, come along.” type of architect. Boring, and not very satisfying, not very profitable.

The architecture school I was studying at and later taught at had a success rate of 90 percent. Internet marketing programs, coaching programs, apprentice programs, etc. have a less than 5% success rate.

Do you think the teaching methodology has something to do with it? … and the fact that ALL teachers at architecture school had to be successful working architects or they would lose their job?

Do you thing the selection process has something to do with it? To get into architecture school you needed to be better than 95% of the applicants: there were 20 people vying for every spot. My best friend got in only the second time around. She is a good architect, still working. Not great, but good.

Watch what happened after just one month of bootcamp type training to this bunch of bozos…

Webinar Crusher 2.0, Robert Plank and Lance Tamashiro’s just graduating another class…

I had MY 90-min webinar yesterday… want to see what I did? Go and sign up to my notification list at http://www.faststartsecrets.com

Sophie,

Awesome…this was very engaging, well done and informative. I’ve got to pull out my Kolbe analysis to see
what my scores are again. Thanks for the reminder.

I didn’t see your website address on the screen to know where to go to enroll.

thanks,
William

or this is what one of my students, Jill had to say

jrthoreson: Thank you Sophie! It was a wonderful presentation! Innovative Stuff! You are going to be famous and I can say, I was one of her first students. Boy am I the lucky onejrthoreson: We really need to drive traffic to your squeeze page jrthoreson: they can get your webinar! teachers will want it… jrthoreson: gurus are going to be wanting your methods!! jrthoreson: no, it’s going to make a difference in the way internet marketers…but all learning is done

If you have time, go and watch my classmates’ 90-min presentations on webinar… you’ll be equally impressed.

http://webinarcrusher.com/summit/

So with that said, I am an avid reader of copywriting advice. I found an interview on my hard drive today on copywriting, and it is the best advice I have ever heard.

You see, most copywriters teach you headline, benefits, call to action… i. e. the parts of sales copy.

I haven’t heard anyone before teaching a whole system of organizing your copywriting like an architect would design a building… it makes sense to me, it makes it easy, it makes it faster, better, and more fun.

Are you interested in checking it out?

And then later today I heard Jim Edwards’ inspired rant about the same thing… using his own going-to-the-gym as an example of how one can actually take action on what they want… in his case, go to the gym and work out, seriously.

And I also heard his resigned “ehh” off camera at the end of the video.

We, coaches, all feel that way. We want you to succeed… we can take you to the water, but we can’t force you to drink.. And, it seems, you don’t, even though, you say, you are thirsty….

So my note, and my planned Internet Kindergarten may be a solution for some… I won’t kid myself that it is for everyone… but for the ones that if you put their snout into the water, they wake up, they say “water” and start drinking it…

Are you one of them?

Send me an email at mavencentral-339076@autocontactor.com
to get yourself on my notification list.

It will be fun.

About an hour later I woke up from a dream of writing THIS article. Here it is, just the way it came to me in my dream:

Each great thing that was ever built started with something that had the greatness, as a potential only.

Most didn’t look like the start of something great. Many times it was a comedy of errors and their correction that took someone to something big.

But, you say, we are always told to create with the big picture in mind… Oh yes, that one. I know that well. The misunderstanding of that notion has robbed me of many successes…

The misunderstanding of that principle has rendered me undecisive, unresponsive, tentative, or jumping from one sure thing to another.

Imagine if the tree thought that every seed it is producing must become a big tree… it would be so afraid of living, it would start to shrink and refuse to go to seed. The prospect of so many wasted seeds would kill the tree’s aliveness and creativity.

No, greatness is a potential, dormant in every little seed, and with enough great little seeds produced, one of them may become a big tree…

Let’s look at MY story.

Back in 1988 I found myself unemployed from architecture, and unemployable at the same time… don’t ask me why, I won’t tell.

I was spending quite a few months depressed, going to self help programs, 12-step, Werner Erhard and Associates, etc. … barely having 3-day worth of work a month to live on.

I couldn’t think of anything to do… I was too entrenched in being an architect. At some point, I did an exercise from the “What Color Is Your Parachute” and found that what I wanted to do, that caused me pleasure, is “put ink on paper and communicate.”

I took it literally at the time, and thought advertising or publishing.

I didn’t know much of either.

I went and apprenticed (free) with a small printer for a while, and learned some stuff, bought a letter press with some letters, wrote advertising in mail order magazines… to sell some pyramid schemes… and then when I really needed some money to earn, I wrote a letter to the two throw-away magazines in my area, asking if they had a job opening for publisher’s apprentice.

One of them called and said that such a job didn’t exist but I could start selling advertising. No “draw” (salary), only commission. Does that put me closer to publishing, I asked, and the guy said yes. I took the job.

I was trained by another salesperson. We visited a few stores in my town–typical advertisers in that paper. We sold 5 small ads that day. I say “we”, but I think it was her. That day completed my training. Next day I walked back to the business area of my little town, and found that by the time I got there, the training salesperson had driven there and sold them, or attempted to. I had no wheels, and soon I had no hope.

I called the other magazine, and bragged that I had sold 7 ads my first week for their competitor… they were impressed. They gave me a 200 dollar advance, and a beat up car with a gas card.

I worked my butt off, sold ads, delivered magazines, partook in every office meeting, went to the printer, went to the typesetter, collected monies… two months later, I was put in charge of designing the ads and laying out the magazine. Two more months later I was offered a partnership in the magazine. Still, my best week I made $400… I didn’t have many good weeks.

I worked 20 hours a day 7 days a week… I was bossy, I was certain, I was “dynamic”, I was disrespectful… 5 months later I was offered the choice to resign, or… blackmail. I resigned. No-brainer.

That same evening I called all the advertisers in my care, the typesetting company and the printer with the same question: Would you take a chance on me for one issue? They all said yes, so next day there was a brand new magazine born, printed and delivered.

I made money with the first issue, and with every issue thereafter. More than $400 a week. :-)

That magazine, through the time, became 90-thousand circulation strong, and I published it for 11 years.

Now, there are two lessons in this story: 1. I first looked what it is that I love so much that I would do it for free (putting ink on paper and communicate) and 2. I was willing to fumble through phases that didn’t seem to go anywhere, and I was rewarded through small corrective steps, with a business I loved.

When I watch internet marketing, I see many thousands who never get started. They got attracted to the visions of greatness (millions of dollars) but are unable or unwilling to start where one needs to start in fear of starting at the wrong place.

I have had coaching clients that were so afraid of making the wrong move, that they never got started… that is until I made them do stuff…

I have had coaching clients that wanted to do internet marketing, but hated every aspect of it… and sucked at it too… of course.

I have had coaching clients that thought that without any skills they can make millions and they never actually learned anything…

Remember, childhood was to learn skills, without the significance. At least in most countries… of course, in the US kids must perform early on, sports are not skill builders, but opportunities to be big… which teaches us early on that we were supposed to be born with the skills we need, and if we weren’t, then we are doomed.

The same applies in business. You need to play first in the sandbox, and build some easy structures, without the significance. Write an article here, a blogpost there, a salesletter here, make a video there, copy and rewrite an ebook, just to practice the structure… Just to get a feel what you like to do. What you are good at.

Every guru you meet started that way.

My current favorite, Eben Pagan, wrote an ebook, full of typos, and that’s how he started his now 20 million dollars a year empire, 7 years ago. He wrote about something he knew something about: seduction. Something that he was personally very interested in… he desperately wanted companionship…

He has made it big. With a topic like that. He learned as he went. He had mentors, teachers, mastermind partners every step of the way. It wasn’t a straight path… not in the least.

You can do it too. Just start getting that every tree came from a seed sometimes as tiny as a pinhead, and then grew. It went through the phases… It didn’t come out a tree at once. It was a seedling for a long time.

Enjoy.

visit video on youtube

or watch it here

I haven’t posted on this blog in a while. Not because nothing was going on… au contraire… too much was/is going on.

I don’t know about you, but just like no one is a prophet in their own land… you are never going to be able to see the value of your stuff like other people do.

Even if you think a lot about yourself, familiarity breeds contempt, and your work is going to be “just what you do”, even if it is/would be of tremendous value to others.

This is why I value what has happened in the past 2 weeks.

You may not know, but the bulk of my income comes from marketing affiliate products.

One of the things I have been marketing, ever since I first started to use it some 2 years ago, is the Healing Codes package, a unique energy product where you use your innate energies to heal the cause of disease… I had a cancerous growth fall off my right arm after a few days of using The Codes… so I am a believer.

I signed up to be an affiliate. I made a few sales here and there, but every month I learned a little bit more about marketing, google adwords, etc. and every time I learned something, I immediately put it into practice with the Healing Codes affiliate program. I watched a webinar 5 months ago, and the rest happened:

The past 4 months the commission, grew $400 every month. Why always 400? Beats me. So I have gotten accustomed to the income, they paid directly to my checking account… until the 8th of this month, when, instead or the money, I got an email telling me that my affiliate status was withdrawn and I wasn’t even going to get my last commission.

Why, you would ask. The answer came right in the email: I violated the affiliate agreement: I did not get my ads reviewed by the 3 people assigned to review marketing material… But the email said, my violation was that I used the product name in my advertising… hmmm. How am I supposed to sell something I can’t name?

I made a quick calculation, and saw that I lost $35K just in the first year (calculating the growth trend also). They lost 140K net, for the first year. Interesting. I wonder if they have heard of the expression: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be rich? Choose!”

Anyway, let’s see what I have learned from this incident that is worth for you to read:

1. Before you invest so much time and energy into marketing a product, check if the company really wants you to market their product, or secretly they hope that you will share with everyone, but they will buy from the company directly, cutting you out of the loop.
2. The processes I employed to go from zero to substantial income could help a lot of people out there… so maybe I should find a way to tell people. If I had had a roadmap like that two years ago, I could have started to make money much sooner, and that would have been worth for me to buy. I forgot to say that I used exclusively PPC advertising, my return on my investments was consistently 10-fold, i.e. with a $3500 a year budget I could turn a 31,300 dollar profit. And some of my keywords ran at $5 a click. Which means: this market is competitive, baby.
3. It will be interesting to watch how the Boomerang Principle will play out.
4. I’d love to train an army of affiliates for the Healing Codes company… if I could do it, anyone can do it.

Another thing that happened since I last wrote, is that I did my first “Craft Your Public Persona” presentation. It needs more work, but I am over the hump. I have worked with a client today, who was praising the knowledge he gleaned from our session, and that felt really good.

I am just wondering how to reach all the people who would be interested in that: coaches, consultants, bloggers, marketers, realtors… anyone, who makes a living selling themselves first, an product second. Everyone, who need repeat clients, repeat sales, etc. Everyone, who needs to influence people. Any ideas? If so, please write a comment. I would appreciate it.

And a 3rd thing: I have built a small video sharing site on blogging but you can put the topic in a search box and it finds videos for you… really great… want to check it out? It is at http://www.mavencentral.com/videos

That’s it for now. Please give me your ideas about how to reach my target audience, and if you have any idea what to do with my lost affiliate position story, so that it can make a difference for others.

So long.

Most of us live a life of quiet desperation. It was true at the turn of the last century, and it is true now.

There was a discipline and coaching paradigm I studied and used about 9 years ago. It is based on axiology, the Nobel Prize nominated work of Robert Hartman.

Axiology is the study of value or quality. It is the science that deals with what is good and what is not. Beyond and independent of subjective judgment.

The test (Value Profile) we ran in axiology had 4 parameters by which we could map out the potential for success of any individual.

One of them relates to the title. The parameter is called “clarity”.

We all think we are clear. Yet we can be a lot less than clear if our life is not a symphony and a victory of the human power and spirit. (Got it? That means you and me and even many of the so called demi-gods of our times.)

Clarity is the relationship between your view and reality (like a percentage) or how well what you see and what you think you see overlap.

I like to use an analogy from my publishing/printing background: In order to print a continuous tone, like a photograph, you need to break up the original to dots. The measure is called dot per inch, which means how many dots, each direction, you can print on a paper without the dots touching each other and therefore causing a blotch instead of a clear picture. Newsprint paper is porous, so the density of of dots on that type of paper is maximum 75 dots per inch. Semi glossy magazines and brochures are printed at about 105-120 dots per inch. Playboy is printed at 150 dots per inch.

When you look at a newspaper picture, sometimes you are not sure if the person has a mole or just there is a shadow or maybe a blotch of ink where you thing the mole is. Glossy brochures are better, Playboy is really really really good.

I use this dot per inch analogy to show that we normally see the world in certain level of clarity (dots per inch). In order to be clearer, one thing we can do, is to add dots where there are not dots.

Another is to remove the blotches, that in clarity’s terms are the misconceptions: societal, familial, or personal.

Adding dots is a simple learning process coupled with friends of colleagues that can help you with. (Critiquing is an important tool, though most people hate it… sorry to say.)

Removing blotches is harder, and this is my specialty. Distinctions are the major tool for tha. Distinctions are those invisible things that once they become visible, lots of blotches disappear. Read my other posts an sites on that http://www.squidoo.com/distinctions or http://www.sophieschoice.org/new-site-on-squidoo-just-for-distinctions/

And come back for more… I am the Distinctions Queen, so all my posts will take you deeper into this rabbit hole.

Well, what comes after that because is what this article is about.

I was in Landmark Education for 20 years, and I went from seminar to seminar, from course to course, from training program to training program.

In the past three years I probably have done 20 programs, seminars, coaching programs… But only 3 in the past year. What happened?

Good question. I grew.

Very much the way you grow a muscle (especially if you are a body builder), one day you use/overuse a muscle, the next day you allow it to rest, and then do it again.

People that follow the pattern I followed for the 22 years leading up to this year, when I actually grew, actually NEVER grow. They use seminars as a way to avoid actually growing. I was guilty of this, myself. Secretly, in my heart, I knew that my parents were right, that no matter what I did, I would not amount to anything.

A year ago this all changed. I met this amazing woman, Pam Ragland, in a coaching program, where we were both students, ha-ha, how ironic. We struck up a conversation and she said that she can wipe away all my negative thoughts. I was desperate for my negative thougths to go away. Living with the pretense, that some day I was going to use all I learned… while that one day never came, was horrible.

I booked her for a private session, and from that one session I suddenly saw that maybe I was wrong, and maybe there is something I could do with my life. And, to my surprise, I found myself in action. That is when I saw how passionate I am about speakers’ success, and how much I would like to teach speakers to be effective at this craft.

Later I enrolled in Pam’s eight-month program that teaches how to drive this new me, that is now a Ferrari instead of a jalope.

I never doubted again that I can do it. I stopped going to seminars, I even cancelled two seminars I fully paid for. I am working, but I am working purposefully. Much like I used to work on a puzzle when I had the box showing the finished picture… fully knowing that all the pieces are there, and it only takes time to put it all together.

I can tell you, a dream life begins with that box cover… and that certainty. Some people can see it themselves, some people are lucky: some committed coach sees it for them. I am that kind of coach. I have never had a client that did not accomplish what I saw possible for them (boxcover).

Are you still going to all the seminars, reading all the books, buying all the programs, but the results you can show for all that learning are meager to say the least?

The natural way to grow, is to grow in spurts, and then consolidate. Grow intensely, and then harvest the benefits (use the knowledge) until the growth almost starts to slow down. The start it all over again.